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TV

This is a summation of every television review on the site arranged by year. Reviews are arranged in alphabetical series title order. Thumbnail review links are provided for all nine and ten star reviews. To find a specific movie you’re looking for it is easiest to use the find functionality of Firefox or Opera.

The BBC got 2011 off to a quality start with this intriguing and entertaining crime drama where the murder mystery is matched by our hero extricating himself from seemingly no-win political situations. Unfortunately, he couldn’t extricate himself from the inexplicable decision not to recommission.

Chuck Season 4 ★★★★★ ★★:

Then it got it back again. Hurrah! The presence of Timothy Dalton was a masterstroke; every time he was on screen was a delight. Sadly, the final episode makes it appear that Chuck will develop Smallville syndrome and become eye-openingly stupid and unwatchable with the writers choosing to do and undo anything their unspoken hatred for the audience spills forth.

While the already transparent formula definitely wore thin in the second half of the season, the entertainment value remained entirely acceptable and watching The Mentalist each week was something to look forward to.

Damages returned for a second season but it wasn’t good. There were highlights but it was almost instantly tiresome and I wasn’t interested in any of the characters old or new. And is it just me, or are Rose Byrne’s ears really small?

House’s formula has never been more transparent than in season five and it’s only really been the caustic comedy and, eventually, psychological drama that kept things together. Hugh Laurie is awesome in every episode but Lisa Edelstein and Robert Sean Leonard also provide a lot of fun and quality. Season six has been more fun.

A largely decent series for Lewis but this is a pale imitation of Inspector Morse and, because the makers are confused about their own characters and setting, the quality is balanced on a knife edge. For the last episode, it fell off.

While, thankfully, far less violent and horrible (generally) than the previous couple of seasons, Smallville once more proves to be a test of loyalty of behalf of it’s viewers. A test that I will fail. I will not be watching season nine.

ITV, somewhat surprisingly, delivered Poirot’s best season for years. Also, given the horrific treatment of Marple, it came as a blessed relief when Christie’s works were treated with respect and little things, like the identity of murderers, were left as the author intended.

David Jason finishes his most successful post-Only Fools and Horses character, Detective Inspector Jack Frost. It kinda just stops but this has been one of ITV’s better detective dramas, especially when using the brilliant but few and far between R.D. Wingfield novels (even though R.D. Wingfield really didn’t like the toned-down TV version of his character).

Another quality season of the show where anything can happen. Highlight is probably the Stolen Earth cliffhanger (the BBC could have warned us we’d need somewhere soft for our jaw to land though deserve serious credit for keeping it completely under wraps), but Catherine Tate as new companion Donna Noble, surprisingly, provided most of the rest.

While a bland but okay pilot movie made it look like the Knight Rider franchise might have new life breathed into it, the first episode of the series later in the year killed it as dead as can be. However, the state of American television is so bad this year that NBC commissioned the series to be completed even though no-one was watching it and anyone who did hated it (source: myself). Perhaps next time the Writers Guild strikes, they could do us all a favour and never come back to work.

Much better than anticipated television spin-off from the big-screen Terminator franchise which doesn’t attempt to ape the supreme action of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies but concentrates on the characters and is all the better for it. When the action comes, it also isn’t as violent as most American television shows (such as CSI, and Smallville, for example) and that is also a pleasant surprise.

Bionic Woman:

An impressive new series which, astoundingly for contemporary American television, is extremely restrained when it comes to the violence in the story (almost all of it takes place off-screen). Glenn Close headlines, and is great, but it’s Ted Danson who impresses the most.